ACL compiles a daily media monitoring service of stories of interest to the Christian constituency relating to children, family, drugs and alcohol, marriage, human rights, religious freedom etc. Visit the ACL’s website each day to see what’s of interest in the news. Please note that selection of the articles does not represent ACL endorsement of the content.

It's a campaign believed to be unprecedented in its size and aggressiveness: New York City is handing out the morning-after pill to girls as young as 14 at more than 50 public high schools, sometimes even before they have had sex.

The risk reduction ethic only aims to sanitise and thereby perpetuate hazardous behaviour. The September 5th edition of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) reports on the prospect of “pre-exposure prophylaxis” as a means of preventing HIV transmission. This term refers to people who are uninfected with HIV taking a prolonged course of sophisticated medications because they anticipate sexual contact with an HIV-infected person.

If masculinity is doomed, so is femininity, as a new book demonstrates. It would be easy to misunderstand the meaning of Hanna Rosin’s now celebrated theme “the end of men”. The title of the American writer’s 2010 Atlantic magazine article, and now of a full-blown book, signifies not the total redundancy of men as sub-species of the human race (although a biology professor recently suggested we were near that point) but the end of masculinity as we have known it.

Gunns Ltd has gone into receivership after the Tasmanian timber company failed to secure funds to keep the company going, putting more than 600 jobs at risk. Mark Korda and Bryan Webster of KordaMentha were appointed receivers and will manage the group's affairs, including continuing the business as an ongoing concern to preserve the value of the assets while a sale process is conducted.

Cherbourg Mayor Ken Bone says alcohol management plans (AMP) in Aboriginal communities are a racist policy and should be removed. The plans were introduced in 2002 and restrict or ban alcohol in Indigenous communities.

Tasmania’s Upper House politicians seem to be gearing up to say “I don’t” to gay marriage when they vote on the issue, probably this week. Crikey runs the numbers. Australia’s best chance of legalising gay marriage in Tasmania is in serious trouble, as nervous politicians baulk at setting a precedent on the hot topic.

State-based same-sex marriage laws would make Tasmania a ``legal laughing stock'', according to former Chief Justice and Governor William Cox. Mr Cox wrote to some MLCs about his concerns about the constitutionality of the proposed gay marriage bills before today's debate.

If marriage equality activists have their way in France, the words "mother" and "father" will be stricken from all official documents under controversial plans to legalize same sex 'marriage'. The proposal which has outraged the Catholic Church there, where only the word "parents" will be used in identical marriage ceremonies for all heterosexual and same-sex couples.

Australia's aid to African countries has more than doubled since 2008, as the federal government has been lobbying for their support for Australia to win a seat on the UN Security Council. Is it coincidence, or connivance? Is Australia just focusing its aid program where it is most needed?

Senator Cory Bernardi has been reviled for associating homosexuality with something repugnant, bestiality. Yet Australia has just awarded its highest civilian honour to a philosopher who provides a moral defence of sex with animals. Professor Peter Singer, the renowned Australian philosopher at Princeton University, believes that the taboo on bestiality is an anomaly, a prohibition that will crumble like all the others.

In response to the Innocence of Muslims global controversy, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan called for recognizing “Islamophobia as a crime against humanity” and “international legal regulations against attacks on what people deem sacred.” In the statement’s wake, the number of political leaders around the world openly musing about restrictions on anti-Islamic speech has only increased.